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Apple's New Mac Pro Review: The Most Powerful Mac Ever

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Apple has combined raw power with ingenious design into something that will make even non-professionals drool.

After languishing with only minor updates for several years, Apple finally released a major update to its Mac Pro desktop in late December 2013. More than a simple redesign, the new Mac Pro feels like a rebirth of Apple's vision for a desktop workstation aimed at the professional user.

Let's be clear. The Mac Pro in 2014 is most definitely designed for the professional user. The average Mac user — or even general Apple fan — isn't the target market for this machine. It's a high-end machine with a high-end price point to match, and it's designed and engineered for users who make their living doing high-end video, audio and other motion graphics work.

Power users and enthusiasts will probably be better suited with a MacBook Pro with Retina Display or iMac. But that doesn't mean it's not fun to kick the tires and explore the power of what something like the new Mac Pro can do.

We couldn't pass up the chance to review the most powerful Mac ever made, nor could we resist seeing just how far we could push this diminutive beast to its limits.

Our test setup

Apple sells the Mac Pro in a variety of configurations ranging from quad-core Xeon processors to a whopping 12 cores. Every Mac Pro ships with dual GPUs as standard, but users can optionally upgrade to a higher-end graphics card. Likewise, the machine can take up to 128GB of RAM.

Our review units specs. This screenshot was taken before we applied system updates.

Image: Apple, Screenshot by Mashable

The Mac Pro we reviewed had the following specs:

8-core Xeon E5 3.0GHz processor with 25MB L3 Cache

32GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC RAM

512-PCIe SSD

Dual-AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

This configuration retails for $6,799.

In addition to the Mac Pro, we also reviewed it with a standard Apple Thunderbolt 27-inch display and a 4K display. Right now, only two 4K displays are fully compatible with the Mac Pro. We used one of them, the Asus PQ321Q 31.5-inch 4K display, in our tests.

In addition to running tests in OS X 10.9.2 and apps such as Final Cut Pro X, Motion and Compressor, we also tested the Mac Pro in Windows 8.1 using Apple's Boot Camp drivers.

Pro design

The design surrounding the new Mac Pro has received a lot of attention. The cylindrical shape has been compared to a Darth Vader accessory, a vacuum cleaner and of course, a trash can.

While it's easy to make some jokes at the round shape, from an engineering perspective, the industrial design is nothing short of incredible.

One of the goals behind the new Mac Pro was to make it as quiet and power efficient as possible. That's where the round shape comes into play. By literally building the machine around a thermal core, Apple has made it possible to dissipate heat and improve power efficiency.

Apple Mac Pro

The Mac Pro (late 2013)

After languishing with only minor updates for several years, Apple finally unveiled a massive update to its Mac Pro line.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

Power of the Ports

The new Mac Pro is 1/8 the size of the old model, but even more powerful.

You can configure the Mac Pro with a quad-core, six-core, octo-core or 12-core processor. Our unit had an 8-core Intel Xeon E5 3.0Ghz processor.

When it comes to expansion, the Mac Pro has six Thunderbolt 2 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI 1.4. It also has the standard assortment of high-end WiFi, Bluetooth and other connectors.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

One Fan

A cornerstone of the new Mac Pro is that it is designed around a thermal core in the center of the machine. There is a single fan that pushes air and heat out from the top.

That allows the Mac Pro to consume less power and run with nary a sound. The Mac Pro makes about as much noise as a Mac mini.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

What's Your Memory

The Mac Pro we reviewed came equipped with 32GB of RAM, but you can max he machine out to 64GB.

Unlike other Apple machines, the RAM is user accessible and replaceable. Just push the tab and take out the module.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

Two Cards Are Better Than One

All Mac Pro machines come equipped with dual-graphics cards. Only one GPU is connected to the display connectors, however, allowing OS X to dedicate one full GPU towards computational power.

This means that apps such Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Photoshop CC can benefit from the enhanced speed and processing time of OpenCL.

The model we tested came with two dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs, each with 6GB of VRAM.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

Good Enough For 4K. Times Three.

The Mac Pro can power up to three 4K displays, two running at 60Hz refresh.

You can actually connect up to six regular monitors to the Mac Pro, using either Thunderbolt 2 or a single HDMI port.

Solid State Delight

The base SSD is 256GB but our unit came with 512GB of super fast storage.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

Made in America

The Mac Pro isn't just designed in the United States, its assembled stateside too.

Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

The core at the center of the Mac Pro contains one fan that pushes air up, not down. This allows the machine to be not only extremely compact, but quiet as well. The new Mac Pro, even while under heavy load, is remarkably quiet; it's about as loud as a Mac mini.

In spite of the power inside the machine, the new Mac Pro's power supply is just 400 watts. Compare that with the over 1,000 watt power supply inside the old tower Mac Pro.

The new Mac Pro is one-eighth the size of the old tower model, but one-quarter the weight. That makes it more dense and heavy than it may appear. But that's a good thing.

Lifting off the brushed aluminum chassis, you have full access to the RAM sockets for easy upgrade access. The other components, including the SSD slot, aren't necessarily user-upgradable, but they are accessible for repair.

iFixit's teardown of the machine back in late December showed this is one of the more easy-to-access and repair Mac computers on the market.

Still, the biggest change with the design of the new Mac Pro — aside from its shape — is that component expansion now takes place via external accessories rather than internal cards and drives.

The old Mac Pro was a mid-tower design that had plenty of empty drive bays and PCIe slots for expansion. Sure, the user could connect an external drive or accessory to the machine, but most of the add-ons went inside the case.

Expansionist policy

Aside from a RAM upgrade (and possibly the SSD), the new Mac Pro has add-ons and accessories that are plugged into the machine. Fortunately, it has lots of expansion options: six Thunderbolt 2 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, two gigabit Ethernet ports, audio plugs and an HDMI out.

The externally expandable design has benefits and drawbacks. On the plus side, just plugging things into the machine is a fast, simple way to expand its power. Connecting a LaCie Thunderbolt/USB 3.0 external SSD into the machine gave us read/write speeds every bit as fast as if we had plugged the 2.5-inch drive directly into a SATA slot on a standard machine.

Anand Lal Shimpi dives into more detail around the PCIe layout in his comprehensive Mac Pro review, but the short version is that thanks to Thunderbolt 2, the user has external access to a high-speed interface directly located on the CPU. In other words, there is no reason that external accessories should be a tradeoff to internal upgrades.

The downside of external upgrades, however, is that it those types of add-ons can take up more desk real estate and can potentially cost more money.

The new Mac Pro is beautifully compact, but for a busy professional, I can see a desk becoming quickly cluttered with accessories. Just for my setup, I had two monitors, one external Thunderbolt hard drive and one USB 3.0 hard drive connected to the machine at once. I still had plenty of ports left, but my desk was a bit of a mess.

This is one reason I fully expect Apple to update its Thunderbolt Display to Thunderbolt 2 (and thus, 4K) in the near future, allowing the monitor to double as a hub or dock of sorts. Being able to plug devices and accessories into a monitor — such as a keyboard, mouse, iPhone or tablet — will mitigate some of the overcrowding issues, but a tricked-out modern Mac Pro does mean you might have lots of devices stacked on top of one another. (You can use the existing Thunderbolt Display as a Thunderbolt hub but it will obviously limit Thunderbolt 2 devices to act as if they were Thunderbolt 1. It's USB hub is also relegated to USB 2.0, rather than USB 3.0.)

It's also worth noting that If you have a lot of existing 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives that you need to access frequently, you'll probably need to upgrade your external enclosure or storage-array setup to Thunderbolt.

Potential external clutter aside, there isn't much I can fault about the design of the new Mac Pro. It truly is a magnificent feat of engineering.

Speed and power: disk, processor and graphics

The Mac Pro, especially with our configuration, is a beast of a machine. As with previous Mac Pro models, Apple has chosen to use Intel's latest Xeon processors. In this case, its the Xeon E5 running on the Ivy Bridge-EP processor line, first introduced in September 2013. These chips are some of Intel's most advanced workstation CPUs.

The graphics cards are dubbed FirePro by AMD and are designed specifically for the Mac Pro, but there are PC equivalents available. The pair of AMD FirePro D700 cards we tested share the same specifications as the FirePro W9000 series of cards.

When it comes to the SSD, Apple has taken the PCIe technology it first introduced in the 2013 MacBook Air and 2013 Retina MacBook Pro line and supercharged it.

In my disk speed tests, I received read/write speeds of nearly 1GB per second. This isn't a fast SSD — it's a freaking gazelle.

Black Magic's disk speed test run on the 2013 Mac Pro.

Image: Black Magic, Screenshot by Mashable

I ran other assorted benchmarking tests, too. According to GeekBench 3, the system rates an insane 25,175 across all eight cores. You can view my full GeekBench 3 score online.

The Mac Pro under GeekBench 3.

Image: GeekBench 3, Screenshot by Mashable

I also tested the Mac Pro under Windows 8.1. According to Microsoft's Windows Experience analysis, the Mac Pro as configured gets an 8.3. This may be low, depending on how Microsoft recognizes the various system components.

The Windows Experience Score for the new Mac Pro

Image: Microsoft, Screenshot by Mashable

Using the Mac Pro with 4K

One of the real highlights of the new Mac Pro and Thunderbolt 2 is its support for 4K displays and cameras.

It's important to note that the world of 4K displays — under both OS X and Windows 8.1, is very much in its infancy. If you want to connect a 4K television monitor to the Mac Pro for video playback, that's relatively simple, but using a 4K monitor is something else entirely.

At the time of this writing, Apple officially supports two 4K monitors to work at a 60Hz refresh rate. Those monitors are the Sharp PN-K321 and the aforementioned Asus PQ321Q. You can use other 4K displays with the machine, but they won't run at 60Hz, which means that if you want to use it for moving a mouse cursor, playing a game or doing more than playing back video, it's going to drive you insane.

Fortunately, developer betas of OS X 10.9.3 indicate support for more 4K monitors as well as retina-like resolution scaling. I'll discuss some of the challenges and techniques for dealing with 4K monitors under both Windows and OS X in a separate post.

I tested the Asus monitor with our setup under both OS X 10.9.2 and Windows 8.1. Under OS X, using standard applications at 3,840 x 2,160 on a 31.5-inch monitor is a bit much. On a 4K monitor, user interface elements are just too small for comfortable use, and I wound up mostly using that display for 4K video playback or playing games.

Both Final Cut Pro X 10.1 and PremierePro CC support 4K video workflows. To test the effectiveness of the new Mac Pro with 4K, I imported raw 4K into Final Cut Pro X 10.1, made some adjustments, rendered the project and then exported the footage in 4K ProRes.

The performance was insanely fast. It took about 15 seconds to bring in a minute of 4K video into Final Cut Pro X.

When it came time to export, that was fast, too. For a one-minute project, exported in 4K ProRes in Compressor, it took about three minutes. For the export test, I actually ran the project off of a Thunderbolt SSD drive; that's what I anticipate the average user doing. Keep in mind the final file was several gigabytes in size for a 60-second clip.

I used the multi-cam feature in Final Cut Pro X 10.1 to edit eight simultaneous 4K ProRes streams at the same time. I'm not a professional videographer by any means, but I walked away impressed and then some.

If you shoot or edit 4K video, rest assured that the Mac Pro will handle it like a champ.

But can it play Crysis 3 in 4K?

Look, the Mac Pro is not designed as a high-end gaming machine. The graphics cards, while exceptional, are workstation cards and not optimized for ultimate game exploitation.

Still, with two 6GB GPUs, I couldn't not try this thing out while gaming.

In Windows 8.1, I loaded up Crysis 3 while connected to the 4K display. With every option set to high or max, I managed to get over 40 frames per second with the game. If I turned down the textures or some of the other settings, I easily could have reached 60-70 frames per second with absolutely no problem at all.

Running the same game on the Thunderbolt 2 display (which has a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440), the game performed even better.

Quite honestly, if you just want a really kick-ass gaming system, you're probably better off not buying a Mac Pro — but it can game with the pros when called upon. Even in 4K.

I also ran 3DMark under Windows 8.1, via Steam. The GPU apparently wasn't in the system, but the results were still impressive. My full 3DMark results show just how much.

The Mac Pro as rated by 3DMark.

Image: 3DMark, Screenshot by Mashable

General app performance

The 8-core Mac Pro is an extremely fast machine. I went through the paces to see how it would perform normal tasks, as well as some tasks such as encoding a Blu-ray or TV show via Handbrake.

For the Handbrake test, I took a 1.2GB MKV file and transcoded it to iPad format using standard settings. It took about two minutes to transcode the file.

Other apps, including Photoshop CC, Aperture and Lightroom all ran without issue. In fact, the best thing I can say about the Mac Pro is that I didn't notice having to wait for anything, even when I was doing multiple things at once.

At one point, I had three different virtual machines running while I had a browser open with 40 tabs, Spotify and a myriad of chat windows. The virtual machines seemed to run better than my 2012 MacBook Air, which says something.

Bitcoin mining

In my quest to bring the Mac Pro to its knees, only one task was able to do the job: Bitcoin mining.

Using the apps Cgminer and BFGMiner, I used the Mac Pro's dual GPU's for some OpenCL and GPU-based cryptocurrency mining. Mining can be extremely brutal on a GPU — especially if you have intensity settings all the way up.

Yes Virginia, the Mac Pro can mine Bitcoin.

Image: Screenshot by Mashable

I managed to crash the Mac Pro using MacMiner while attempting to mine Litecoin at an intensity above 18. By "crash," I mean that the system slowed to a crawl and even after exiting the app, only a hard reboot would get it functional again.

With the intensity set to a more normal level, however, I was able to consistently do nearly 1,000 Mh/s. For Bitcoin, this still isn't enough to become a profitable endeavor, but I suppose it could be useful for Litecoin.

Again, I don't think anyone should risking burning out a $6,800 computer by mining for crypto-currency. Still, it's fun to see the power of the Mac Pro.

Wrapping up

As configured, the Mac Pro I tested, along with a 4K monitor and a Thunderbolt 2 display, clocks in at over $10,000. That's a lot of money. Is it worth it?

For the regular user, almost definitely not. You're better suited for a Retina MacBook Pro or an iMac.

But for the professional, the person who wants a machine that can edit 4K video, render motion graphics and do tons of photo work, it's a different story. This is the sort of machine that is built with an eye towards the future.

It's also remarkably compact and quiet. While testing the machine, I kept trying to think of scenarios that would make sense for me to own one in my day-to-day life. Alas, for me, it doesn't fit. If you are a professional or see yourself needing a machine with tons of computing power, the Mac Pro is not just the fastest Mac on the planet, it's one of the finest computers I've ever tested.

Apple Mac Pro

The Good

Fastest Mac ever • Supports 4K in and out • Can play high-end games while mining bitcoin

The Bad

Kludgey 4K monitor support • External expansion may clutter your desk • You probably don't need all this power, even if you want it

The Bottom Line

The new Mac Pro is the ultimate professional machine that even non-Pros can covet. As Ferris Bueller said, 'If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.'

BONUS: The New Mac Pro: A Love Story

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